Judge offers early win for Arbutus as Moderna vaccine patent spat heats up

A Delaware fed­er­al judge has sided with Ar­bu­tus’ in­ter­pre­ta­tion of three patent claim terms in its case against Mod­er­na, giv­ing the biotech a small win in a drawn-out patent dis­pute.

Ar­bu­tus and Genevant filed suit against Mod­er­na in 2022, al­leg­ing the com­pa­ny’s his­toric mR­NA vac­cine used lipid nanopar­ti­cle (LNP) tech­nol­o­gy de­vel­oped and patent­ed by Ar­bu­tus. While plain­tiffs agreed that the Covid-19 pan­dem­ic would have been “im­mea­sur­ably worse” with­out the wide­spread avail­abil­i­ty of Mod­er­na’s vac­cine, they ar­gued that the achieve­ment was made pos­si­ble by Ar­bu­tus’ dis­cov­er­ies around LNPs.

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